Blindspot

John Lee and Cassandra Campbell are delightful in this witty historical novel, chock full of well-researched and amusing tidbits of life in eighteenth-century Boston. In alternating chapters, we meet Scottish rogue Stewart Jameson, a portrait painter who's run away from his creditors in Edinburgh, and Fanny Easton, a young girl with a sordid past who disguises herself as a boy and becomes Jamie's apprentice. Lee has Jamie's raffish attitude and moral dilemma down pat, and Campbell nicely captures Fanny's predicament as she struggles to remember that she's a boy. Authors Kamensky and Lepore, both historians, offer clever conversations and situations involving politics, growing unrest in the Colonies, slavery, women's rights, romance, and even murder. Lee and Campbell keep things light and entertaining. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

August 4, 2008
Professors Kamensky and Lepore try for playful historical romance, but deliver instead a novel that is, if rich in period detail, also overwrought, predictably plotted and at times embarrassingly purple. The year is 1764 and portrait painter Stewart Jameson has been chased by debtors from his native Scotland to Boston, where he quickly opens shop and takes an apprentice, the half-starved orphan, Francis Weston, who turns out to be Fanny Easton, the disgraced daughter of one of Boston’s leading citizens. Stewart does a good business with Boston’s better class, which puts Stewart and Fanny in a good position to solve the murder of an abolitionist. They are joined at this task by Stewart’s old friend from Edinburgh, Dr. Ignatius Alexander, a university-trained runaway slave. The mystery plays out with little surprise; rather, the narrative is driven by Alexander’s hatred of slavery and by Stewart and Fanny’s tawdry relationship. Unfortunately, however, both of these lines prove awkward, and while students of the era may find enough period detail to carry them through, the cheesy plot and facile characterizations are likely to turn off most readers.